We are all Writers

 Pro Blog Post #3

Let’s get one thing straight–I am not one of those English teachers who fell into their job because they always wanted to write the next great American novel but needed a day job to pay the bills. So when I hear my students say, “I’m not a writer,” I readily reply, “Well I’m not a published author either, but I’m a writer everyday.” Queue the sound of my own laughter :) I went into this field knowing that I wanted to coach people to believe in their own abilities and that growth is far more satisfying than any end goal or product.

In her guide for teachers, Vicki Spandel (2005) embodies these beliefs in the chapter entitled, “The Right to Write Badly.”  It seems so obvious, but when she mentions how no one looks at a little kid who hasn’t yet learned to swim as a “non-swimmer,” it makes me question how we get to the point in our lives where everything seems so finite and fixed. Even my high school students of just 15 (yes! ONLY 15 I sigh, not wanting to think of my own age) can be so fixed in their mindset about what they can and cannot do. She espouses many beliefs  about what should be happening with writing in the classroom and while some of them seem to be out of touch with current teacher or state-mandated expectations (tell an ACT scorer the thesis doesn’t need to be established at the beginning of an essay!), the message remains clear: Students need to write more often to normalize it as we need to revise more than assess. Amen.

My own writing process mirrors the now seminal research by Linda Flower and John R. Hayes. “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing”(1981), breaks down the different, hierarchical steps to writing, stressing more than once that each writer spends more or less time, cycling back through processes, making goals and completing them in their own pattern. I love their idea of calling writing (putting ideas into visible language) translating. It seems incredibly appropriate for today and all the modes in which that might appear. I spend a lot of time visualizing my writing, creating sketches and mind maps that transform and get shifted around. My planning stage is extensive and I set goals for information to be gathered and collected on a page or in a binder, spending hours going over the text of others. I still go back to note cards because I need the tactile event of shuffling and reorganizing my ideas visibly in front of me. I know I could do this through a jam board, or even just a google document, but I still crave the paper in front of me. Perhaps to my detriment, I often cannot just write out all my ideas at once and go back and revise. The subprocesses of revising and evaluating happen paragraph by paragraph, and at times, sentence to sentence. Exactly what I often tell my novice writers not to do! While that loop might slow me down, I embrace that part after such a long planning stage.  I feel that most novices rebel against the planning and therefore, I think they need to “vomit” on the page in order to organize afterwards.

With the advent of multi-modal, particularly digital spaces in which we can compose today, I find that the process doesn’t really change. Even for this blog post, I compose on a google doc before cutting and pasting my writing to make it fit, flow, and appear aesthetically pleasing. With so many visual ways to compose, it is also important for the editing process to happen in a space that isn’t live or available until a person is ready to share their work. What is most exciting about some digital tools and apps is the ability to collaborate and get feedback quickly from many people, including people we may never meet in person. What I have found to be really important is that I can't force anyone to believe in one mode, system or process when it comes to writing. While I am a tactile organizer, I grew up having that as my only option. Now, using the various tools available, I my goal is to help students figure out which tools will work best for them.